Review By Marion Halligan

House and home … Canberra is ''a convergence of the natural and the urban''. Photo: Graham Tidy

Probably the worst crime of a book reviewer is to comment on the book she herself would have written, rather than the one she is dutifully reading. It's a temptation for me, since I have lived in this city for slightly more than half its capital life, but I am vigorously resisting.

So, what has Paul Daley done? A serious and sober job going back to the earliest days, before anybody thought of building a city here; before the days when the white pioneers were a tough and usually ruffianly lot, to the time of the Aboriginal people, who, as usual, knew how to live here and especially how to feed themselves well and manage the grasslands of the Limestone Plains, as they came to be called. He looks into history, geography, archaeology and, above all, politics.

He is a journalist, and politics is his bread and butter. And it is true that the decision to make the capital here was a political one, not just because neither Melbourne nor Sydney was prepared to let the other have the honour, as the myth goes, though a myth with a grain of truth. But in fact it was a vision, a grand and noble one, in keeping with the vision of the federating fathers who thought they could build a nation out of a ratty handful of colonies.

Canberra by Paul Daley.

It is a vision that has not always been easy to sustain, in the light of insults such as John Howard refusing to live here, and especially in the tendency the rest of Australia has to blame the politicians they elect in much greater numbers than the locals do for the decisions they make. Canberra cuts, Canberra slashes, the headlines say, when the city has nothing to do with it.

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Daley spends some time considering the curious misprizing of Canberra. Most countries, performing the almost impossibly difficult task of creating a vibrant and viable city out of nothing, would be proud of it. The people who live here are, but their fellow Australians, by and large, are not.

Robyn Archer, who is planning the city's centenary celebrations for next year, is hoping to turn this around; it will be interesting to see how successful she is. People who come with an open mind often find it very attractive, and it has turned about the closed minds of a great many. I am typical of this, so was my husband, coming to situations in Canberra, determined to stay for only a year or two, and ending up decades later determined never to leave. Children born here usually love it, go away then happily return.

Daley and his wife left, then found themselves irresistibly drawn again. It is famously a great place to bring up children. The air is clear, the light is marvellous, it's easy to get around, though I am not sure that Daley's comment about ''traffic-free roads'' is always true any more.

A book like this is always going to be one person's view. Daley's wife is a journalist, too, and what they both see is the politics. I was a schoolteacher, now a writer, my husband was an academic; we saw politics on the news and in the papers, but it seemed as close as if we had been living in Newcastle: something way out of our orbit.

On the other hand, my aunt, who was a senior nursing sister here in the 1940s, thought Parliament was the most exciting show in town. It would have been, then. Whereas Canberra these days is a great many different things to its inhabitants, and Daley works at talking to a variety of these. Academics, for instance, and writers; he came and drank coffee in my kitchen and asked me about being a writer in Canberra. He looks into the poets, too. And the historians.

He describes the city's ''convergence of the natural and the urban''. We know we live in a bush capital and the biggest urban forest in the world. We are highly educated and prosperous in a bootstraps kind of way. We don't have any of the real wealth of Sydney or Melbourne, and certainly not Perth. We know we will never be allowed to build ourselves a house on the hills, but we can all walk ourselves and our dogs there.

''Canberra is an accidental miracle,'' Daley says. I'd give us a little more credit than that.